twinBASIC Update: April 23, 2023
On April 23, 2021, I helped Wayne Phillips introduce the world to twinBASIC at the Access DevCon Vienna conference. I boldly predicted that twinBASIC (along with the Monaco editor) would replace VBA and its outdated development environment by 2025. With that goal in mind, this weekly update is my attempt to keep the project fresh in the minds of the VBA development community.
Every Sunday, I will be providing updates on the status of the project, linking to new articles discussing twinBASIC, and generally trying to increase engagement with the project. If you come across items that should be included here, tweet me @NoLongerSet or email me at mike at nolongerset dot com.
Here are some links to get involved with the project:
- Custom twinBASIC IDE Installation Guide (NOTE: the twinBASIC VSCode extension is under a feature freeze until 2023)
- GitHub Issue Tracker (report bugs)
- twinBASIC Discord Server (chat about the project)
- twinBASIC/VBx LinkedIn Group
Highlights
Light Week(s)
There were no new releases for twinBASIC this week and only minor bug fix releases last week.
Wayne Phillips provided a brief explanation on the recent (relative) slowdown:
Apologies to all; I'm struggling to get back up to speed after having those couple of weeks off, given the backlog of non-tB work. I'll get there, so please just bear with me a little longer and then I'll be back to full throttle on tB.
Today, April 23, Wayne followed up with this update:
Just a quick update my friends: it looks like this coming week will be the last "catch up" week, and then I'll be able to focus back onto twinBASIC. Normal service will resume in May :). Thanks for bearing with me.
Around the Web
What's the Future of VBA?
Several mentions of twinBASIC in this Reddit thread which asks, "What's the future of VBA?"
Here are a few highlights:
For me, the future of VBA is the VBA community stepping up to keep the language and its tooling alive and evolving, with projects such as twinBASIC (100% compatibility but MUCH more powerful than classic-VB, commercial / 32-bit free) and Rubberduck (free & open-source VBIDE add-in) striving to enhance the developer experience in every possible way.
- RubberduckVBA
Fifth, if something like TwinBASIC gets any traction then there will be a natural pathway for people to begin in VBA and migrate their projects to TwinBASIC when they need to access all of the modern features of programming languages.
- EightYuan
As for a future, I think the upcoming release of twinBasic will be a bit of a game changer. It will do a lot fo4 improving VBA extensibility - it will allow us to create easily distributable tools for improving how we can use VBA and it's host application (Excel, Word, Etc). We will be able to produce our own DLLs, our own. COM objects, a better IDE experience with modern code editing tools. And this is for both 32bit and 64bit.
- Lazy-Collection-564
Extended twinBASIC Discussion in VBForums
The original monster twinBASIC thread at VBForums.com had some heavy activity over the past week (I guess that's what happens when there's a dearth of tB releases 😂).
The discussion centered around some of the new features that twinBASIC already supports (generics), will support in the future (multi-threading with native syntax), or may support one day (type inference, lambda expressions, et al.).
Updates to fafalone's ucExplorer Control
From fafalone on Discord:
i'm now doing feature testing for my ucExplorer control, if anyone wants to check it out or suggest last minute important features I overlooked. It does quite a bit more than the basic ExplorerBrowser demo, including supporting customizing frame views which was difficult since it's very, very poorly documented. i know the basics like reporting selection/navigations works. if all goes good i'll try building controls tomorrow.
https://github.com/fafalone/ucExplorer
NOTE: You may need to restart the IDE each time you want to run from there (i made a bug report about this)
Changelog
Here are the updates from the past week. You can also find this information by visiting the GitHub twinBASIC Releases page.
No releases this week.